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But Rosie was a brat.
“You don’t have anything from this decade?” she said, putting the records back on the shelf and making sure the stack was tidy and also obscured the light source on the jammer.
He was chewing when she turned. He didn’t hurry to respond. Took his time swallowing. His scrutiny making her playact a squirm. “What? We don’t have to let everything from the outside world go, do we? Some of it’s damn good.”
“We have to let the notion that we’re missing something go,” he said. “All we’re missing is corruption. Everything in front of us is fresh and new.”
“But you kept these. Aren’t they corruption as well?”
He sighed and put his silverware down. “I’m only a man. As much as I know looking back is profoundly bad for us, I sometimes have trouble letting go. I lived in the decay longer than you did. I know more of its pleasures and more of its pain.”
Oh, he was good. Showing vulnerability. Pulling empathy strings and tempting her to comfort him. Nicely done but no dice.
She leaned on the shelf. “You don’t have any Michael Jackson or Madonna or Rihanna. I can live without Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, but no Pink, no Adele, no Beyoncé?”
He didn’t react, other than to pick up his fork. He must want to paddle her for that slap in the face of his manipulation. He had those records because they were valuable, just like he’d kept everything valuable everyone living here had given up.
“Any chance I could have just one piece of my tech back?”
He broke a hunk of bread off a crunchy dinner roll. The sound of it tearing was menacing in the silence. She let it drift and his scrutiny of her intensified. He was undressing her. Touring her body, inch by inch, planning where to put his hands, how to hold and move her, wondering what her skin tasted like.
When a lover did this it was thrilling, a burner lit under a well of desire. When a predator did it, it was like being loofahed with poison ivy. It scratched you so deeply inside you knew it would take a long time for the itch to protect yourself to wear off.
Orrin doing it was a confusing stir of feelings. It made Rory want to call him out. Leap onto the table and kick him in the throat, stab his hand with his fork. And it made her tense to contain the rage that rose because her body reacted, her nipples tightening, her insides fluttering. She couldn’t have stopped her blush if she’d tried, it was the outward effect of her inner battle.
At last, he got up from the table and unlocked the door using a key from his pocket. “You’re forbidden from taking another lover until I say you can.”
“You can’t—”
He spun about and took her chin in his hands. Her flinch was as impossible to control as her blush had been. His fingers bit into her jaw. He was a powerful man and if she struck out at him now she would lose every chance she had to get access to this room of secrets.
“Go back to the kitchen, Rosie Woods, and find your peace. When you do, come to me and let me help you find your bliss and your purpose in life.”
If was an effort not to bring her knee up hard. It was an effort not to run from the room. She had no guarantee the cell phone jammer would remain out of action, but as threats went Orrin’s could only get worse.
Chapter Fifteen
Ten minutes into their walk from the work site to the spruce forest, Zeke was ready to deck Chuck.
Bad enough his hip ached, and he still wasn’t past his Starbucks cravings, and the deep need for a dozen donuts was constant
. Bad enough he was desperate to see Rory, to know not one dark hair on her head had been harmed. And goddamn thinking about almost kissing her gave him a hard-on that would’ve made sleep impossible even in his Grand Master.
And now he had Chuck, the guy who’d pointed the barrel of a gun to his throat, as an unwanted escort.
There was no decent Frappuccino, donut fix or trust for the city slicker, much as he was now considered one of the crew.
On top of which, there was the Susan factor to deal with. His rejection of her had the highest Rotten Tomatoes score for quality content in this Netflix, YouTube desert. It got mentioned at least daily.
“You play cards like a Vegas hustler, but you don’t want to dick our lovely Susan and you want to take a freaking tree to that strange bird, Cadence,” Chuck said.
“She’s my sister’s cabinmate. She can’t help being shy.” And she was his tragic excuse for needing to get to the spruce forest drop zone.
“Doesn’t explain why you want to bring her a dang tree. You got the right to fuck her without having to do this grand gesture stuff.”
The grand gesture, and the hysterical laughter it’d caused, was the only way he’d been able to get permission to walk to the spruce forest in the last afternoon of their week on-site. They’d worked double shifts under floodlight with a bigger crew all this week, as if there was some deadline they had to beat. He didn’t dare ask and he hadn’t been able to walk out at night without raising suspicion.
“It’s a joke because I stank up her cabin. I wanted to do something nice for her and Rosie.”
